His Brother's Bride

“Of course. I loved him.”

“I looked out for you.”

Her heart rate sped up at the intimate tone, and to her dismay, her stomach churned with desire.

“I know you did,” she said softly. And then, out of self-preservation, she reminded both of them, “Your dad did, too. You guys were a first for me.”

“But there’ve been others since?”

Laurel thought about that. “No,” she finally said. “There’s been no one since.”

* * *

SCOTT HADN’T MEANT the conversation to turn so serious. After the night before, he’d been determined to do exactly the opposite. But he just couldn’t leave well enough alone.

“What about you? And your needs?” he challenged. “Don’t you sometimes just need things for yourself?”

“I only need to be able to do what I can to make the people around me happy so they’ll keep me around.” A smile accompanied the words. She was joking.

But Scott knew there was truth in those words.

Frustration welled up inside him. He loved her. He could give her the security she’d always craved. The sense of belonging.

And yet he knew it was the one thing he’d never have the opportunity to do.

* * *

AS THEY CROSSED the state, the landscape—and the road signs—began to change. Orchards gave way to bogs. Advertisements for sugar bush tours and roadside stands selling maple syrup gave way to signs for cranberry-harvesting tours, a cranberry museum and the Massachusetts Cranberry Harvest Festival.

The bogs were impressive, stretching as they did for acres and acres.

“Did you know that for every acre of cranberry bog, growers have an additional four acres of supporting land?” Scott asked.

She frowned, looking out at the bo

g they were passing. A sprinkler system was completely soaking the land, except where workers appeared to be pulling weeds. She’d been living on this side of the state for several years, Laurel thought, yet she knew practically nothing about the cranberry industry.

“Supporting land?” she asked.

“Wetlands, uplands, ditches, flumes, ponds—sources for the fresh water supply the plants require...”

Scott continued, rattling off statistics like an audio encyclopedia. Facts about the berries, the growers, the economics.

Laurel absorbed the information, fascinated by how much Scott knew. He’d often regaled them with a wealth of nonessential facts. Paul and his father had humored him, but Laurel, feeling like a little kid, had soaked it all up.

“Because pollination is essential to a cranberry crop, growers use an average of one to two beehives per acre of bog,” he added.

Laurel looked out the window for the hives, knowing that Paul would have teased her for doing so.

It wasn’t that Paul had been mean—or even small-minded. He’d just enjoyed teasing her about her voracious need to know everything. But he’d also told her he’d loved her unending curiosity.

Paul was extremely intelligent. His IQ was probably genius level if anyone had cared to find out. But his knowledge was as focused as his life had been. He knew everything about the things that affected him and little about anything that he couldn’t use directly.

Scott, on the other hand, knew all kinds of interesting facts that had no practical application other than broadening the mind and fostering an appreciation of life and the larger world around him.

The bog stretched as far as she could see.

“I wonder how they harvest all that.”